Kula, the decentralised impact investment firm, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Lionhart Capital to develop a proof of concept for regulated on-chain title tokenisation of real-world assets (RWA).
The agreement marks a structural development in how RWAs can be brought on-chain as legal title to the asset itself, with ownership rights ascribed on-chain and recognised by the relevant regulatory authority rather than referenced by the token alone.
“As tokenisation scales toward the projected trillions, a single question will separate the projects that endure from the ones that fail,” said Chris Turner, co-founder of Kula.
“Does the token carry title to the asset, or does it only refer to an asset held somewhere else? We issue title. The ‘real world’ is not the hard part, title is.”
According to Kula, the gap between the token and the underlying asset is where the risk lives, and its model intends to close that gap by making the token itself serve as the title under jurisdictional mandate.
The firm said the tokenised RWA market has expanded rapidly but argued that much of what currently trades as real-world asset tokenisation remains referential or contractual, with tokens pointing to assets held through chains of contracts, custodians and legal structures.
Kula’s issuance runs through a licensed Virtual Asset Service Provider operating under a regulated financial services framework, rather than operating solely as a technology partner.
According to the firm, regulated issuance is expected to become a baseline institutional requirement, meaning the infrastructure to support it must be in place before demand fully arrives.
“Kula was built on the conviction that regulated infrastructure and community governance are not constraints on capital deployment, they are what make it sustainable,” said Paul Jackson, CEO of Kula.
“Title tokenisation is the application of that conviction to a market that is growing fast and, in our view, is not yet asking the right questions about what the token actually represents.”
